Nine pieces of real property in the New Orleans area purchased and owned by Honduran government official Mario Roberto Zelaya Rojas (“Zelaya”) are proceeds of criminal activity and subject to seizure, according to a civil...more

Greetings, Court fans!
The Court returned to action yesterday with two quick-and-unanimous decisions on statutory construction, Jesinoski v. Countrywide Home Loans (13-684), addressing the time and manner for exercising...more

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone recently profiled the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking in his article, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare....more

There are two “tiers” of penalties for violation of the Florida usury statutes, one civil and the other criminal, and both are severe. Civil penalties usually involve forfeiture of the entire interest charged (or contracted...more

For a landlord, it’s a bad day when your tenant gets busted for operating a meth lab, and the local authorities condemn your house because it’s contaminated with the byproducts of his business. It’s even worse when you learn...more

The BankinBits blog, which discusses recent developments in the banking industry, has within the first quarter of 2014 addressed a diverse range of topics including banking services for the marijuana industry, the shuttering...more

Your next-door neighbors may look like normal, law-abiding citizens, but you never really know what they’re hiding beneath their homes – like a largescale marijuana grow operation, perhaps? One such operation was uncovered in...more

The civil division of the Justice Department has preliminarily concluded that JPMorgan broke federal laws in connection with its sale from 2005 to 2007 of subprime and Alt-A residential mortgage securities, and the bank is...more

In Brief:
- Significant jail time can result from overseeing and directing unauthorized robo-signing activities.
- Victims of unauthorized robo-signing include residential mortgage servicers, in addition to...more

The problematic practice of robosigning – whereby banks and other lenders improperly foreclosed on properties through formulaically processing foreclosure documents – has been much in the news over the past couple of years....more

Under Florida law, usury is defined as the willful and knowing charge or receipt of interest in excess of 18% per year for credit transactions involving less than $500,000 or between 25% and 45% per year in a credit...more

As part of its ongoing efforts to combat mortgage fraud and other related financial crimes, on November 8, 2011, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published in the Federal Register a Notice of Proposed...more

Question: Is a mortgage lender that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a “financial institution” itself a “financial institution” for purposes of federal criminal bank fraud?
Answer: No, according to the Ninth Circuit Court...more

On August 7, 2010, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed new legislation affecting mortgages, Chapter 258 of the Acts of 2010, “An Act Relative to Mortgage Foreclosures” (the “Act.”) The earliest version of the Act was...more

Law enforcement officials have said that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and American International Group (AIG) are 4 of 26 companies subject to corporate fraud investigation by the FBI. The investigations come in...more